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10 Dec 2016 3:50:52pm

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Perhaps it may be informative to consider using the word "truth" more subjectively. After all I don't think men who lived in an age when the earth was believed to be flat and at the centre of the cosmos meant to lie to their children when they passed on what would later be discovered were complete falsehoods. They were in a sense incapable of knowing any differently and certainly committed no deliberate deceit.

So with respect then to the concept of truth to which you allude in terms of "an ultimate reality which confers existence and intelligibility on everything" what makes us so eternally arrogant as to assume we're equipped with the tools and knowledge to gauge it? You may believe or disbelieve things about it, give it different names and try as best you might to explain it to your children without deliberately lying to them. But will it be truth?

As I see it knowing what little we do know about the nature of certainty and how it constantly eludes us it would be intellectually dishonest to presume knowledge that we know we lack. And we should not by wishing commit an act of self deceit in pretending to be certain without evidence. That's my truth, it may not be yours.

It is in the nature of what it means to be self aware that we can, and probably will, say just about everything there is to be said about our lives and the nature of what in our experience it means to make a difference in them without being either nihilistic or particularly well informed about "ultimate realities". Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in a place and time where we're allowed to think for ourselves may thus live examined lives and in so doing come to know our own truths.